Armchair Detectives

Introduction

When Edgar Allan Poe began writing mystery stories during the 1840s, he not only inadvertently created the template for a new literary genre—detective fiction—but he also introduced the first armchair detective, C. Auguste Dupin. Dupin solves crimes that the police cannot. In “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842), set in Paris but based upon an actual murder near New York City, Dupin obtains his information from newspaper accounts. The story is made up of summaries of those articles by Dupin’s housemate, who serves as has chronicler, and Dupin’s commentary and conclusions. This first armchair detective and his descendants gather information second hand, rather than through personal observation. They succeed by using their intellect, intuition, and logical reasoning powerswhich Poe called ratiocinationto deduce solutions. Sedentary observers, armchair detectives rarely visit crime scenes or interview witnesses and suspects themselves. Unlike their descendants, however, Dupin and his chronicler are undeveloped and shadowy figures, although Dupin’s unnamed, loyal amanuensis clearly has limited intellect and imagination.

In a footnote to “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” Poe writes that the story

was composed at a distance from the scene of the atrocity, and with no other means of investigation than the newspapers afforded. Thus much escaped the writer of which he could have availed himself had he been upon the spot and visited the localities.

Early in the story, Dupin’s housemate and chronicler says that he “procured, at the Prefecture, a full report of all the evidence elicited,” along with copies of every newspaper containing “any decisive information in regard to this sad affair.” After the two men review the news reports, Dupin asks his unnamed friend to check the validity of affidavits while he examines the newspapers “more generally than you have done.” His associate, however, fails to see the object of Dupin’s efforts.

Baroness Orczy

Not until half a century later did another writer utilize Poe’s armchair detective prototype. Baroness Orczy’s Old Man in the Corner first appeared in the Royal Magazine in 1901. Between that publication and 1925, he appeared in thirty-eight tales. Her unnamed sleuth passes his time in a London tearoom, where Polly Burton, a novelist-turned-newspaperwoman, often sees him. Described as “timid and nervous as he fidgeted incessantly with a piece of string,” the old man gleans his knowledge of crime cases mainly from newspaper accounts and recalls facts and dialogue with amazing precision. His analyses for skeptical Polly are in the Dupin and Sherlock Holmes tradition, focusing upon minutia that the police miss. He works cases backward until, through ratiocination and intuition, he arrives at solutions. He states, “There is no such thing as a mystery in connection with any crime, provided that intelligence is brought to bear upon its investigation.”

Most of the cases that the Old Man shares with Polly are set in Victorian and Edwardian London. He tells Polly that money is the key to nine criminal cases out of ten. In “The Lisson Grove Mystery" (1904), a young woman and her boyfriend murder and dismember her father to get his recently inherited estate. In “The Mysterious Death on the Underground Railway” (1908), a destitute husband poisons his wealthy wife. In “The York Mystery” (1908), the Old Man concludes that a doting wife has killed her husband’s blackmailer, though the crime remains, as Polly thankfully reports, “a mystery to the police and the public.” The conventional methods of the police are inadequate when confronted with the criminals about whom the Old Man tells, and he gloats that crime interests him “only when it resembles a clever game of chess” in which all the intricate moves lead to the checkmating of the antagonist.

The Old man empathizes with criminals who are “clever and astute enough to lead our entire police force by the nose.” Although the guilty often are tried in Orczy’s stories, there is typically inadequate evidence to convict them. In “The Mysterious Death in Percy Street” (1908), the Old Man obliquely suggests to Polly the source of his disdain for the police. Mrs. Owen, the elderly caretaker of artist studios, is found dead in her flat after withdrawing her savings from a bank. A young man who had befriended her is charged with murder but released when he establishes an alibi. The case is left unsolved, though suspicion falls on her irresponsible nephew, who sought money from her before disappearing. The story ends with Polly concluding that the Old Man himself is Bill Owen, who years earlier took advantage of a fortuitous accident to bring about his aunt’s death and steal her money. However, before she can confirm her suspicion, the Old Man disappears, and Polly never sees him again.

’s Sherlock Holmes, a contemporary of Orczy’s Old Man, is as cerebral as any armchair detective and often functions like one. However, he is primarily a man of action, as the very title The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892) suggests. If Doyle had chosen as his sleuth Sherlock’s older brother Mycroft, who was as indolent as he was brilliant, the mysteries he wrote would be of the armchair detective type. The popularity of Doyle’s novels and stories and those of Orczy encouraged others to write crime fiction, but most of the other writers’ stories do not feature armchair detectives. The type was probably not more popular because sedentary detectives, more receivers than seekers, have inherent limitations. Armchair detectives rely on others for help, static settings offer few opportunities for action, and the formula makes it difficult to generate suspense over the greater length of a novel. These limitations help explain why there are more short stories than novels with armchair detectives and why novels with armchair detectives often stray beyond the traditional boundaries of the form.

Agatha Christie and Others

Agatha Christie was among those who, in the wake of Holmes and Orczy, wrote about armchair detectives. Her armchair sleuth is Miss Jane Marple of the bucolic English village St. Mary Mead. In The Thirteen Problems (also called The Tuesday Club Murders), a 1932 collection, Marple sits by her fireplace knitting—recalling Orczy’s Old Man sitting and knotting string—while various friends describe cases of murder, smuggling, and other diversions from their experiences. After a worldly professional vainly attempts to solve a crime, the old spinster draws parallels between a present problem and things from the past, considers suspects—guided by her belief that human nature is unchanging—and arrives at solutions.

Christie’s second attempt at an armchair detective appears in a 1934 volume of twelve stories, Parker Pyne Investigates (Mr. Parker Pyne, Detective in the United States). A “happiness consultant” or Miss Lonelyhearts, Pyne offers his services as a detective through newspaper advertisements. After listening to clients’ woes, he turns to a stable of helpmates for assistance in restoring their happiness, jewels, or whatever they have lost.

’s 1929 novel The Poisoned Chocolates Case, an expansion of his story “The Avenging Chance,” is a memorable example of armchair detection that included in his list of the ten best detective novels of all time in a 1946 essay. Similar in form to Christie’s The Thirteen Problems, Berkeley’s novel features the six amateur sleuths of the Crime Circle, one of whom is Berkeley’s detective Roger Sheringham. While talking about a murder case that Scotland Yard cannot solve, they review motives, develop theories, and finally reveal the least likely suspect as the perpetrator.

From the 1920s through the 1960s, British author wrote dozens of novels and some stories starring Dr. Lancelot Priestley, a brilliant scientist to whom Scotland Yard friends and others bring cases. He is aided by his secretary, Harold Merefield, who “could be trusted to ferret out the facts without which Dr. Priestley very rarely moved far,” as Rhode says in The Claverton Affair (1933). Indeed, it is while reviewing Merefield’s notes that Priestley happens upon the solution to the mystery in that novel. As if he were playing chess, Priestley reduces everything, as he puts it, “to its simplest and most logical terms,” guided by the belief that the greatest mistake detectives can make is forming their theories too early and then skewing new facts to fit their preconceptions.

An American contemporary of Rhode, Anthony Boucher, also created an armchair detective. His first novel, The Case of the Seven of Calvary (1937), has John Ashwin, a professor of Sanskrit at the University of California, solve a series of campus murders in the classic armchair detective manner. With a graduate student who is a Dr. Watson-like narrator as a central character and Ashwin’s foil, Ashwin lists clues, offers playful digressions into scholarly byways, and includes a narrative pause to challenge readers in the manner of . The novel seems almost a parody of the genre. At the same time it is a seriously conceived and developed whodunit, beginning with narrator Martin Lamb promising “nothing irrelevant and everything relevant. This shall be a model of fair play.” When Lamb brings Ashwin newspaper accounts of a murder, the professor asks, “Now just what is it you want me to do? Play detective with you?” After Lamb reviews what he knows about the case, Ashwin says, “let us begin, in the conventional manner of detective fiction, with that immortal trinity: Motive, Means, and Opportunity.” This deliberate pattern informs Ashwin’s progress throughout the case, as Lamb regularly brings him up to date. Ashwin prods Lamb on facts through Socratic dialogue, presents him with a detailed timeline of the case, and urges him take new directions. In the end, Lamb confesses to a friend, “We knew everything; it just happened that Ashwin was the only man in Berkeley who could piece it together.” Only in the conventional assembly scene—a traditional conclusion in whodunits—does Ashwin meet all the players. He then reviews the double murder case, confesses his missteps along the way, and points the finger of guilt. In a coda, Lamb mimics Holmes’s Watson by tantalizingly promising other examples of Ashwin’s detection skills in the case of the Maskeleyne cipher and an odd business of the Angel’s Flight. However, Boucher never wrote another Ashwin story.

Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe

Another armchair detective of the 1920s and 1930s was Vincent Starrett’s Chicago bookstore owner George Washington Troxell, who appeared in stories such as “Too Many Sleuths” (1927). Like Boucher’s Ashwin, Troxell is an obese man who usually is ensconced in an oversized chair when a local police reporter, Fred Dellabough, comes to him with problems. Troxell thinks up possible solutions and sends Dellabough in search of supportive evidence. However, many of Troxell’s ideas prove to be wrong, so Dellabough goes on many futile errands. Troxell and Dellabough may be the prototypes for Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. Wolfe is another sedentary fat man, and Goodwin is his hyperactive assistant and chronicler in Rex Stout’s quintessential armchair detective novels.

Beginning with Fer-de-Lance in 1934, Stout wrote more than seventy novels and novellas about the successes of his rotund sleuth, who rarely leaves his Manhattan townhouse. While Wolfe meets clients and maintains a mutually beneficial relationship with the police, narrator Goodwin functions as Wolfe’s legs. By having his assistant play a major role in each novel, Stout finesses the inherently static nature of the armchair detective genre. In effect, he combines a largely cerebral whodunit form with another popular type, the hard-boiled detective. Goodwin becomes romantically involved with women, occasionally gets in fights, physically restrains suspects, and generally is the antithesis of his inactive boss, who eschews physical contact with others. A self-described office boy, Goodwin is superb at following instructions but leaves the thinking to his boss. Indeed, when Wolfe is ready to wrap up a case, Goodwin generally remains in the dark about its resolution and often even seems indifferent to his employer’s solution. Even with hyperactive Goodwin on hand, the constraints of armchair detection are such that Stout occasionally moves Wolfe from his normal milieu. In Some Buried Caesar (1938), the action occurs in upstate New York, where Wolfe goes to show his prize orchids. He is involved in a car wreck and happens upon a double murder case.

John Dickson Carr, best known for locked-room mysteries featuring Londoner Dr. Gideon Fell, also wrote armchair detective novels. Similar to Ashwin, Troxell, and Wolfe, Fell is an oversized, highly educated eccentric. In The Blind Barber (1934), whodunit writer Henry Morgan tells Fell about the strange events that occurred during an ocean voyage from New York. The first half of the book constitutes Morgan’s narrative. This is followed by an interlude of several pages in which Fell makes some observations and lists eight clues that Morgan overlooked. After seven more chapters, Fell offers eight additional clues and then identifies the murderer. In sum, Carr’s armchair detective is present for only a small part of the novel, framing the crime narrative and bringing it to a conclusion.

Yaffe and Asimov

Reminiscent of Orczy and Christie are James Yaffe’s eight “Mom” stories, which he published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine between 1952 and 1968. Yaffe used an unvarying formula: A New York police detective and his wife have dinner with his mother every Friday night, during which the mother invariably asks, “So, Davie, how is work going these days?” After the detective tells her about a current crime, she asks three or four probing questions and proceeds to solve the mystery, not only through her uncanny ability to isolate clues from her son’s narrative, but also by drawing parallels between a present problem and her own experiences, much as Christie’s Miss Marple does. In his introduction to My Mother, the Detective (1997), a collection of the stories, Yaffe explains that when planning his first story, he made a choice:

Mom would be an armchair detective. She would never visit the scene of a crime, grill a suspect, or, God forbid, look at a corpse. All her inquiries into murder would take place at her own dinner table. . . . Violent crime is outside the experience of most of us . . . but we are all familiar with the venal landlord, the crooked TV repairman, the good-for-nothing son-in-law, the beaten down wife, all these everyday morally imperfect types that Mom uses as analogies in solving her son Dave’s murder cases.

Yaffe also follows this pattern in four Mom novels that he wrote two decades after his first short story.

Hewing closely to the traditional template are Isaac Asimov’s Black Widowers and Union Club stories of the 1970s and 1980s. These stories are formulaic narratives involving monthly meetings of a men’s club at which mysteries are introduced, discussed, and solved. At each dinner gathering, a guest introduces a mystery that the six Black Widowers attempt to solve. When they are stumped, their waiter Henry comes up with the solution. In “Yes, but Why?,” the sixty-third story in the series, Asimov departs from his formula by having Henry himself present the problem; however, the development of the narrative is otherwise unchanged. The professional, well-educated men ask probing questions and hit upon the solution, but as the story’s title suggests, identifying the motive is the focus of the story. Once again, Henry—as in the other stories—provides enlightenment.

Variations on Armchair Detective Stories

An example of the armchair detective genre that is both nonformulaic and memorable is Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time (1951), in which her Scotland Yard inspector, Alan Grant, is confined to a hospital bed with a broken leg. Grant becomes interested in the historical mystery of whether King Richard III was responsible for the 1480 murders of his nephews, the princes in the Tower of London. Assisted by an American researcher, Grant accumulates evidence, develops theories, and resolves to his satisfaction the historical controversy about the king’s culpability. uses the same gimmick in The Wench Is Dead (1989), in which temporarily bedridden Inspector Morse becomes intrigued by a nineteenth century murder, starts to doubt the verdict, and enlists his colleague Sergeant Lewis and a librarian to help him investigate the case.

In a number of novels and short stories that often are described as thrillers, Jeffrey Deaver adds a new twist to the armchair detective genre: Lincoln Rhyme. A feisty former forensics chief of the New York Police Department and a nationally known criminalist, Rhyme is a quadriplegic who can move only his head, shoulders, and left ring finger. Introduced in The Bone Collector (1997), Rhyme is confined to his bed—though he makes rare forays in a specially equipped wheelchair—and assists his former police colleagues by reviewing the case records and laboratory reports they bring to his room and guiding them, by telephone, as they search crime scenes. His room is better outfitted with scientific equipment than most small police departments. He relies extensively upon the legwork of policewoman Amelia Sachs. Because of Deaver’s creative concept of the armchair detective, his novels also are prime examples of the police procedural genre of the type as well as forensic thrillers in the manner, and rivals both for the amount and sophistication of technical detail, characterization, suspense, and surprising plot twists.

Although not as popular as other whodunit types, armchair detective stories constitute a historically important subgenre whose elements are present in much of crime fiction. Further, the label “armchair detective” has come to refer to mystery readers who attempt to solve crimes along with their favorite fictional sleuths. That use of the term even inspired the title of a magazine, The Armchair Detective, which Allen J. Hubin launched in 1967.

The twenty-first century gave rise to a wave of mystery novels and saw a growing interest in true crime among audiences, particularly in the form of podcasts. This allowed the audience—the true and forever armchair detectives—to engage with crime stories in a new way. For fictional literature, though, characters like Poe's Dupin were harder to come by. Instead, audiences liked protagonists and crime solvers who were on the move, often novices and amateurs. Though a few one-off characters who sat behind computer screens and unraveled crimes and mysteries from their desk chairs were created, the likes of Yaffe’s Mom and Christie's Marple seemed to have faded from popularity.

However, in 2016, Joe Ide's IQ (2016) introduced a protagonist whose intellect and mysterious background fit the bill of the armchair detective. Throughout this first novel in the IQ Novel Series, we learn about IQ, or Isaiah Quintabe, a tall, thin, orphaned Black teenager living in the Los Angeles area. His intellect is beyond measure, and his interest in problem-solving and deductive reasoning mold him into a Holmes-like character. The difference is that Holmes is assumed to be intelligent, and his skills seem given. IQ, on the other hand, has to hone his skills and choose to use his intellect for good. His sidekick of sorts, Juanell Dodson, adds the Watson component to the plot, though in more of a con-man, comedic fashion. However, Dodson's prowess and street-smarts and IQ's reasoning and brilliance help them solve cases. While IQ acts more like an armchair detective at the beginning of this first novel, as the book—and series—progresses, he certainly leaves the chair. However, his skill set and backdoor crime-solving methods are reminiscent of armchair detectives that Doyle, Poe, and Christie would be proud of. Ide's IQ series, as of 2024, contained six books, and Ide won countless awards, including The Anthony Award in 2017.

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